To meet the insatiable demand for inexpensive and inexhaustible data storage, the long and steady march of progress in the field of data recording and electronic playback has relied on many technical approaches. No approach has outperformed the versatility and extremely high storage densities of magnetic recording, in which a signal is recorded by selectively varying the magnetic moments of physical regions of media such as flexible tapes or rigid (typically rotating) disks. Another broad class of approaches relies on variations in the physical shape of the surface of the media. Such features are not detected directly, but rather are used to cause corresponding variations in characteristics such as reflectivity, coercivity, and the like that may be detected accordingly (e.g., an optical detection system, in the case of variations in reflectivity).